General Conference

This week we got ready for our trip. Tom spent Monday mowing yards.  We had joyfully finished the Roller Court house.  The Spring park house is still on hold, but we had agreed to mow it until it closed, so Tom went and mowed those houses and then our own.

The weather is finally breaking.  We appear to be done with the hot weather and are down in the 70’s and low 80’s.  And much lower humidity.  Our trip forecast cooler weather, too.

Tuesday we drove to Jonathan and Kristy’s house.  We barely got there in time for dinner.  We’d planned to leave earlier… but had to go back to the house for a few things we forgot to do, and then had a few errands to do on the way out of town.  We had a short, but pleasant visit with them and then left Wednesday.  We picked up Isabelle from seminary and took her to the high school on our way out of town.

We had two long days of driving with a stop in Cheyanne. Books on tape kept us entertained.We took a walk in the morning and came across this elk in the front yard of one of the houses.

 We arrive at Chris and Jen English’s house Thursday evening.

Friday we went to the Bountiful temple with a great view of the valley.

Then we went to Deseret Industries and a book store. In the evening  we went to a Kenya Nairobi Mission Reunion. It was fun to talk with people who had recently been in Kenya. We visited with the Horner’s who had been in Kisumu and with the Shakespeares who had been LDS Charities missionaries. The just released mission president —President Higgins—  gave a mission update. It was exciting to hear that Eldoret had expanded and could be a stake soon and that Nairobi had two stakes now.

When we were in Kenya, the mission president was responsible for 42 branches. Now there are stakes and districts and there are only 4 or 5 branches that are the mission president’s responsibility. Elder Sitati, the 70, was there with his wife, to listen to what was going on in his homeland. He shared his conversion story.

So it was a delightful evening catching up on people we knew in Kenya.

On Saturday we went to General Conference. We listened to General Conference in the Tabernacle the first session. The second session we were able to be in the Conference Center. We were way up in the back, but it was still really amazing to be in the presence of so many Latter-day Saints who love the Lord and are trying to follow him.

We loved the conference talks and the landscaping and flowers around temple square was lovely. On Sunday we stayed with our niece and her family and watched general conference at home.

To me the talks were about the power and value of prayer— prayers of gratitude and prayers to get us through hard times. That hard times are a part of mortality, but because of the plan of happiness, we can have joy even though we will go through difficulties. I thought there were a number of talks on how to strengthen ourselves even in hard times, on having joy, and on repentance and the joy that comes from repenting.

Maybe those were the messages I needed to hear.

Tomorrow at 6am Tom will go to Chris’s (Dr. English’s) surgery to have his trigger finger fixed.

I hope you have a great week!